Today

Rats wired up to electrodes, housed in an experimental Skinner box, continually press a button to give themselves powerful, pleasurable sensations. The rats go into a veritable lever-pushing frenzy, even when it means depriving themselves of food.

Consider the case of two car owners: One is looking to switch their SUV averaging 12 miles per gallon (MPG) to an SUV averaging 14. The other is looking to switch their compact car averaging 30 MPG to a newer model averaging 40. Both individuals drive 10,000 miles per year. Who of these two people would save the most gasoline and money?

Imagine going to live on a planet where the sun never moves in the sky. No sunrise, no sunset.Several years ago, I became obsessed with tidally locked planets. The notion of a world permanently caught between two extremeswith one half always illuminated, the other always in the darktook hold of my imagination.

Quantum pigeons don't like to share.In keeping with a mathematical concept known as the pigeonhole principle, roosting pigeons have to cram together if there are more pigeons than spots available, with some birds sharing holes. But photons, or quantum particles of light, can violate that rule, according to an experiment reported in the Jan. 29 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We have been writing about the measles and the measles vaccine a lot recently, because we are not only in the middle of an outbreak, we are in the middle of a global resurgence of measles. We are also in the middle of a heating up of the social media battle between antivaxxers and respectable scientists, health care providers, and science communicators.

Officials in Clark County, Washington, have now confirmed 53 cases of measles, almost entirely among the region's unvaccinated children. Gov. Jay Inslee has declared a state of emergency, while the local public health director last week compared the virus to a lit match, and his communitywhere just 81 percent of children have received their first measles-mumps-rubella shot by the age of 5to a can of gasoline.

Everyone knows that quantum mechanics is an odd theory, but they don't necessarily know why. The usual story is that it's the quantum world itself that's odd, with its superpositions, uncertainty and entanglement (the mysterious interdependence of observed particle states). All the theory does is reflect that innate peculiarity, right?

Einstein's theory of general relativity is more than a hundred years old, but still it gives physicists headaches. Not only are Einstein's equations hideously difficult to solve, they also clash with physicists other most-cherish achievement, quantum theory.

Although it has been 45 years since Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), abortion continues to be a highly controversial and polarizing issue within the body politic. At the two ends of the continuum are the radical pro-life and radical pro-choice advocates.

How do you talk about genetics and race?One way is to calmly state the increasing evidence of meaningful genetic differences between human populations and then engage in honest and robust debate about the social and political implications, if any, of such inter-group divergence.

We're often told we're living in a post-truth world where conspiracy theories have replaced facts, expertise, and rationality. This may or may not be true, but there is no strong evidence showing that people today reject facts in favor of conspiracy theories more than they have in past historical eras.

Modern science is largely a team sport, and over the past few decades the makeup of those teams has shifted, from small groups of collaborators to ever larger consortiums, with rosters far longer than that of the New England Patriots. Answering big questions often requires scientists and institutions to pool resources and data, whether the research involves detecting gravitational waves in deep space, or sorting out the genetics of brain development.

Donald Knuth is one of the world's most famous living computer scientists. He's known for his pioneering efforts to bring rigorous mathematical analysis to the design of computer algorithms. An emeritus professor at Stanford University, he's currently writing the fourth volume of his classic book series, The Art of Computer Programming, which he's been working on since the early 1960s.

Back in the summer of 2016, a big earthquake struck northwestern Turkey. That's not so unusual, considering that the region sits atop a highly active branching fault network that has a history of producing some seriously powerful tremblors.The strange thing about this particular quake is that it lasted for 50 days, and not a single soul felt it.

In the desert town of Lajamanu, Australia, at the bend of a narrow dirt road, Carmel O'Shannessy worked at a school as a teacher-linguist in the early 2000s. Lajamanu's Indigenous Warlpiri people, who live in the country's Northern Territory, were skilled at drawing sustenance from the landscape's parched red soil, and O'Shannessy soon discovered hidden cultural riches the Warlpiri had stored up.

Deep below a mountain near Naica, Mexico, miners searching for fresh ore deposits in 2000 came across an unexpected and awesome sight. Massive, milky-white crystals towered around them, filling a horseshoe-shaped cave. Luminous beams of gypsum bigger than telephone poles, nearly 12 m long and 1 m wide, gleamed in the miners' lights, jutting in all directions out of the brown limestone walls, floors, and ceiling.

It is increasingly hard, as an archaeologist, to convince anyone you are an archaeologist. In the public imagination, there are sartorial requirements (whips, twin thigh-holstered 9mm pistols) that are simply untenable in the field, or indeed in airport security on the way to the field. Worse yet, modern archaeologists fall down on expectations extending even beyond hat choice: many of us spend our days working in perfectly nice laboratories, and almost[1] never have to escape from lava pits, crashing boulders, or high-stakes poker games in Siberia. And one of those things we do in our...